Best Green Light for Migraine Pain
What makes MyGreen Lamp better?
Summary
Clinical trials show green light therapy results in significant reductions in pain from migraine headaches, fibromyalgia, and osteoarthritis.
Researchers have never tested green wavelengths that correspond to the natural light environment of the shady forest.
Only MyGreen provides 530 nm and 545 nm green.
What's Wrong With Migraine Medications?
Migraine headaches are a billion dollar a day problem in the United States, and anyone who suffers from chronic migraines will confirm that medications like pain relievers and triptans don't work. In fact, they make things worse.
Why Green Light Is Getting More Attention for Pain Relief
Most people avoid all light when they are experiencing a migraine. Doctors call it photphobia because their headache patients will typically lock themselves in a dark room or closet to avoid exposure to light that makes the headache worse -- until researchers at Harvard University discovered something surprising. 530 nm green light shown into the eyes, when used in the absence of all other wavelengths, provided pain relief (Noseda et al. 2016). This finding was confirmed by studies at University of Arizona at 525 nm (Martin et. al 2021) and has since been generalized to show that green light relieves more than headache pain. For example, the University of Arizona researchers observed improvements in pain scores associated with fibromyalgia (Martin et al. 2021) and researchers in Halifax, Nova Scotia measured a significant improvement in three different measures of pain in osteoarthritis patients (O'Brien et al. 2026).
Despite the growing number of studies, no one knows how the green light provides pain relief, or whether one particular wavelength of green works better than other wavelengths. It may be that Harvard and University of Arizona chose the 530 nm and 525 nm wavelengths simply because that's what was available to them, rather than because they had reason to believe that would be superior to others.
What the researchers never thought to ask was "Where in Nature might human beings experience green light to the exclusion of all other wavelengths?"
The answer, of course, is in the shady forest.
Shady Forest Light is the Future of Photobiomodulation
There are two wavelengths of light that dominate the shady forest:
Green, and
Red/nearinfrared (NIR)
Compared to the peaks at 550 nm and >700 nm, the wavelengths tested in clinical trials make only small contributions to the natural light of the shady forest.
MyGreen Lamp Works Fast for Pain Relief
Until MyGreen, the best engineered green therapy light devices available on the market all focused on the 525 - 530 nm light that replicated the Harvard and University of Arizona studies. Their logic was to recreate the laboratory setting that was working in clinical trials.
The MyGreen Lamp is unique in that it improves upon those trials.
MyGreen delivers both the 530 nm light that has already been demonstrated to be successful and it adds 545 nm that better represents forest light -- even though it has never been studied in clinical settings. Moreover, it provides these wavelengths at intensities the researchers would likely consider to be extreme.
The big different is that the research protocols still require low-level light in dark rooms for up to an hour of indirect exposure with eyes open. MyGreen takes a different approach.
First, the green light intensity in the MyGreen Lamp is strong enough to penetrate closed eyelids, so instead of a dark room, patients using MyGreen shut out all other wavelengths by shutting their eyes. That empowers clinicians to use MyGreen with success in their regular office setting, or for patients to use MyGreen at home without shutting themselves off from the rest of the world.
Second, customers and patients who try the MyGreen Lamp report that it works much faster than other green light therapy devices. Just ten minutes of exposure has proven effective for significant reduction in subjective feelings of pain. Most people begin to feel a soothing benefit almost right away.
While some peope might beleive that the high intensity of the green accounts for the faster action in MyGreen, I doubt that's the case. I think its more likely that MyGreen works so much faster because of the 545 nm wavelength that better matches the natural shady forest environment.
References
Endler JA. The color of light in forests and its implications. Ecological monographs. 1993 Feb;63(1):1-27.
Martin L, Porreca F, Mata EI, Salloum M, Goel V, Gunnala P, Killgore WD, Jain S, Jones-MacFarland FN, Khanna R, Patwardhan A. Green light exposure improves pain and quality of life in fibromyalgia patients: a preliminary one-way crossover clinical trial. Pain Medicine. 2021 Jan 1;22(1):118-30.
Noseda R, Bernstein CA, Nir RR, Lee AJ, Fulton AB, Bertisch SM, Hovaguimian A, Cestari DM, Saavedra-Walker R, Borsook D, Doran BL. Migraine photophobia originating in cone-driven retinal pathways. Brain. 2016 Jul 1;139(7):1971-86.
O’Brien MS, Amey S, DeBow C, Mukhida K, McDougall JJ. Ambient green light reduces knee pain in osteoarthritis patients. Canadian Journal of Pain. 2026 Dec 31;10(1):2598285.
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